This blog was initially launched as a resource for Ron Mohring's Working Class Literature course. New poems are posted irregularly. All are welcome to share and comment on poems by and about work and the working classes. To suggest a poem for inclusion or a book for the recommended reading list, please email ron dot mohring at gmail dot com; put Working Class Poems in your subject line. Thanks.

9.20.2009

The Red Shoes

Pulling out government coupons for the first timeIn a Krogers twelve blocks from her walk upSo the bagboys and cashiers and seniorsBrowsing tabloids would all be strangers,She’s slow motion through and past their stares.She feels every nuance of her bodyAs a tense repressed trembling, a calculatedConscious stepping, just as much a danceOf desperation as that solo waltzAround the brass pole in the gentleman’s clubShe’d never do. Nothing said, but the gistOf the story bared, Lonnie gone and the carAfter missed payments, no degree, nurses aideNot enough for even store brand soup,And those looks from everyone contributeTo the scrutiny she’s already put herself under,The wondering what’s become of herLeast dashed hope, like that man in the dominionOf his cubicle at the welfare officeTeasing out the names of men who stayedThe night. She’s been made small. She’s been cut downTo size like that little girl with the red shoesTold by the angel she’d dance for allThe vain children, dance through the moonlightAnd the villages and the dark dreamy woods,Who never stopped even when she stood beggingThe executioner not to lop off her head,Then letting him harvest her feet instead.So she seasons her sauce with damp saltFrom her own eyes and her back to her sonIn his proud sneakers and best sullen thirteenBecause he won’t ever know she’s goodAs dirt, a polite little clot of nothingWaiting while that laughing bureaucratCarried on in front of her long and personalOn the phone. Approved was the word he used,Meaning yes to those two sacks which would lastHowever long they must like the wholeBrutal fiction of grace, the executionerGiving the girl crutches after the axe.